Donkey Kong Jr. Math (NES)

Donkey Kong Jr. Math has both a solid idea for how to make math fun and perhaps the absolute worst way you’ll ever be made to do math in a video game. While it does already fall into the common edutainment game trap of being more about recitation than learning, it really does feel like a game at odds with itself thanks to the fact one side of it seems to understand you should try and make an educational video game work as a game but the other only makes math horrendous and agonizing even when compared to just doing it on paper.

Starting with what is clearly meant to be Donkey Kong Jr. Math’s main modes, Calculate A and Calculate B both require two players to be enjoyed properly. In a round of either, the giant gorilla Donkey Kong will hold a sign up revealing a certain number and your goal will be to reach that number with the available numbers and symbols in play. You will play as Donkey Kong Jr. or his unexplained pink duplicate, the numbers required to form math formulas dangling from chains overhead. The young apes carry over the abilities featured in the NES version of Donkey Kong Jr., both able to jump and clamber across the chains, but the jump is rather paltry. It isn’t very likely you’ll be put at risk often when jumping though unless you decide to take the low road, the plus, minus, multiplication, and division symbols all appearing on the ground which is separated into small islands. Falling into the water will just waste some time before you’re taken back out, but you’ll learn quickly time is of the essence in Donkey Kong Jr. Math if you want to win in the Calculate modes.

The numbers dangling from the chains in the Calculate modes are all single digit, ranging from 1 to 9, and the only way to form larger numbers is to gradually build them up by combining them through the math symbols below. The numbers that appear on the chains are not guaranteed to include all possible digits, so when the round starts, it is crucial to quickly find out what you need and try to beat the other player to reaching your desired numbers. The empty spots left by taken numbers will gradually get filled and any symbols you grab immediately appear elsewhere, and depending on the number you’re working towards, these elements can greatly shift how the round goes. For example, if the goal is to get to 81, the easiest way would be multiplying 9 by 9, but if there are not enough nines present, you might have to concoct a new route to the goal, making for a more interesting scramble where you do have to more closely consider the math you’re doing as well as the numbers your opponent seems to be going for. You can body block them, although that is a fairly weak sort of interference and the kind where there’s nothing to push the player to abandon this tactic so it is an uninteresting way to stall but also can grind things to a halt if it’s your only option to avoid losing the round.

One interesting element is you cannot discard numbers or symbols once you grab them, meaning if you accidentally make a huge number you have to work back from it and if you snag the wrong symbol you’ll still need to do a formula involving it to be rid of it. However, there are definitely some elements that make the potential of Donkey Kong Jr. Math sometimes harder to enjoy. First and definitely most disheartening is the fact that when a round starts, it might very well be impossible for one player to conceivably win. Going back to the hypothetical round where you need to hit 81, if the multiplication symbol appears on your side along with two nines, there is little the other Donkey Kong Jr. can do to sabotage you, the apes moving so slowly they might not even reach the opponent’s side before the only quick solution to reaching that number can be put in. This is definitely a big problem in the Calculate A mode where the numbers are kept smaller and more reasonable. While kids might need a bit to figure out the best option, people with decent math skills will find many rounds are decided not by your actions but by who started on the favorable side.

Thankfully, Calculate B is more complex. Calculate A rarely touches on the triple digits and most answers can be reached with a quick bit of multiplication and maybe a short addition after if its a prime number. Calculate B on the other hand introduces much harder to reach numbers. Triple digit numbers, sometimes even negative numbers, are the norm rather than the exception, and they are will often require constant digit grabbing to finally reach the number. Calculate A will let you pick all of the numbers you’re working with, but Calculate B can sometimes start you out with 50 or 100 already in your formula to make reaching larger numbers quicker but also sometimes more complicated. Trying to get to -733 by way of single digit numbers ends up being a proper test of figuring out how to do the math best, because constantly subtracting or adding will be slow and likely make you lag behind a player who is working out a cleverer route using multiplication and division.

Donkey Kong Jr. Math still won’t escape some of its issues in the more captivating Calculate B mode. One player can still be given a huge advantage just by where they happen to start and there’s not really anything you can do about an ape in your way, but it does make doing math into a bit of a competitive race and one that rewards more advanced long term thinking rather than going for single formula wins like in the simpler Calculate A. Even adults can find this mode to provide a bit of fun when it’s not bogged down by circumstance provided there isn’t a huge gulf between players in understanding math, and had the game done a better job of weeding out the situations where you still find a player being essentially handed a win it might have at least been a rather decent time-waster between playing more involved multiplayer games.

The people likely to get Donkey Kong Jr. Math would be young children whose parents want them to learn or practice math and it’s likely going to be very hard to convince them to play along, let alone find another child of the same age or skill to compete in multiplayer. This shouldn’t count against its sometimes entertaining multiplayer, but it does mean that many children will instead find themselves forced to play the only single player option available: +−×÷ Exercise. This mode could serve as the poster child for why educational video games often fail miserably in trying to make their material into some sort of game, because everything it adds to the process of solving a math problem only complicates it more and slows down the process.

In +−×÷ Exercise you are still Donkey Kong Jr., but now you are tasked with solving ten math problems in a row. You can choose the exact format you want to test, but once you pick your poison, you are thrown into a space filled with chains. One chain contains a question mark on it, but if you climb up and push it into a lock, you are just skipping the math problem that is currently displayed. To actually solve it, there are seven chains hanging to the right, a Nitpicker bird flying above one of them at a time. The bird is just an indicator, and as you climb the chain, the digit you’re selecting will rise or fall based on your position on the chain. Once you want to lock in your number, you get off that chain, usually by clambering over to the one next to it with a single press of left or right. The game will indicate the spot you will be filling in next with a white square, and once you’ve input a digit for every spot, you’ll either get points based on how quickly you put in the correct answer or see Donkey Kong Jr. freak out and then have only the correct numbers you filled in stay as the others are wiped away.

Immediately it becomes apparent that entering numbers in +−×÷ Exercise is tedious, obnoxiously slow, and most important of all, not even a tiny bit fun. You’re going up and down a chain with no obstacles to impede you, only score as a way to get you to do so quickly, and it’s actually much faster to just pull out some paper and a pencil and solve the on-screen problem there. The game wants you to fill in numbers to show your work for multiplication and division as well and yet it doesn’t let you fill in the carried numbers when doing addition with larger numbers. It does make some sense a game nominally teaching you math would want you to actually fill in the work rather than just entering solutions, but it drags things out even more as you have to shimmy your way up and down the chains again and again just to complete a math problem that won’t even reward you with much fanfare or value for finally inputting it all correctly. Even doing just the ten problems asked of you on the simplest option will feel like it drags and it’s hard to imagine anyone liking math more after such an excruciating and poor way of asking them to input their answers, this mode simply being math complicated even further and yet it doesn’t even make it more compelling to figure out since the main variable added is a lot more time spent putting in your answers.

THE VERDICT: Donkey Kong Jr. Math nearly had a decent idea for multiplayer educational fun, the race to combine numbers and symbols to reach a designated target first actually leading to some competitive rounds and in Calculate B it can even reward advanced planning and adaptability. Unfortunately, Calculate A and even some rounds of Calculate B can be decided too easily just by which player starts by the best numbers and symbols and when the target number is too simple, there’s not much you can do to overcome the random poor luck. +−×÷ Exercise is an absolute joke of a mode though, the act of filling out your answers made laborious with no interesting visuals or rewards for slogging through the tedious process of just constantly going up and down chains with no opposition in action less riveting than using an abacus.

And so, I give Donkey Kong Jr. Math for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. Calculate B’s highs when it’s giving you the hard to reach numbers that make for competitive races and actually engaging attempts to figure out the best numbers to grab does so much work to keep Donkey Kong Jr. Math from being a complete trainwreck. +−×÷ Exercise, had it been asked to stand on its own, would undoubtedly earn my lowest rating, Atrocious the perfect word to describe a game that presents children with the sometimes unappealing world of math and finds a new way to make it even worse to engage with. The slowness, the vapidness, the sheer lack of creativity on show in +−×÷ Exercise serves as such a perfect example of what not to do when trying to make entertainment out of a subject you want someone to learn, the input process here just obstructing what should be such an easy task. Had there been maybe enemies to avoid that could spice things up, but the idea of just going up and down chains to choose digits feels like it should be scrapped entirely in favor of maybe something closer to the digit layouts seen in the multiplayer modes. That would likely not be too enjoyable still, but even if you couldn’t hypothetically lay out more compelling levels, at least you’d be more involved in grabbing numbers and then you can add some danger after to at least entertain the potential learner. The focus on recitation isn’t too bad if you consider Calculate A and B more like competitive quiz modes rather than learning tools, but those modes also need to tidy themselves up. Calculate A basically being the easy mode for kids who barely understand multiplication and division may let it slide, but keep Calculate B consistently difficult to compensate. More importantly, don’t allow numbers and symbols to so easily skew towards one side or the other.  The game could have included the classic NES/Arcade style of having movement wrap around so you could quickly reach the other side of the screen to have a chance of interfering, or the multiplication symbol could have been given a spot of value and honor to start the round since it is so often the deciding factor.

Donkey Kong Jr. Math likely stumbled into its occasional moments of effective and lively math battles since otherwise the designers would likely have realized the issues with where the numbers and symbols appear. Those times the rounds are fair and engaging challenges definitely don’t make it worth seeking out since they’re let down a bit too often by random factors, but on places like the Nintendo Switch Online NES app, it’s not too bad to jump in and try a Calculate B round with a friend. On the other hand, +−×÷ Exercise deserves absolute scorn for being made with so little care or thought. It was like the creator only thought how Donkey Kong Jr. could possibly enter numbers and didn’t ask if that was interesting, fun, or something you can do quickly, and when a whiteboard or worksheet end up a better way to do math than your supposedly entertaining video game, you know you have utterly failed. Donkey Kong Jr. Math has a narrow but not all too rare window of enjoyability in Calculate B, and that saves it from being one of the worst edutainment games of all time.